Enemy of Mankind

Radiolab

WNYC Studios

Science, Natural Sciences, History, Society & Culture, Documentary

4.6 • 43.5K Ratings

🗓️ 10 December 2020

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Should the U.S. Supreme Court be the court of the world? In the 18th century, two feuding Frenchmen inspired a one-sentence law that helped launch American human rights litigation into the 20th century. The Alien Tort Statute allowed a Paraguayan woman to find justice for a terrible crime committed in her homeland. But as America reached further and further out into the world, the court was forced to confront the contradictions in our country’s ideology: sympathy vs. sovereignty. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Jesner v. Arab Bank, a case that could reshape the way America responds to human rights abuses abroad. Does the A.T.S. secure human rights or is it a dangerous overreach?

Additional music for this episode by Nicolas Carter.

Special thanks to William J. Aceves, William Baude, Diego Calles, Alana Casanova-Burgess, William Dodge, Susan Farbstein, Jeffery Fisher, Joanne Freeman, Julian Ku, Nicholas Rosenkranz, Susan Simpson, Emily Vinson, Benjamin Wittes and Jamison York. Ken Saro-Wiwa Jr., who appears in this episode, passed away in October 2016.

Supreme Court archival audio comes from Oyez®, a free law project in collaboration with the Legal Information Institute at Cornell.

Support Radiolab by becoming a member today at Radiolab.org/donate.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Wait, you're listening to radio lab from WNYC.
0:19.4	This is radio lab, I'm Jack Ebb and Rod.
0:21.4	Okay, so, Supreme Court has a lot on their plate right now and a lot of Supreme Court news
0:28.1	is common at us.
0:30.0	Maybe one thing that you might have missed is that last week the Supreme Court heard a case
0:35.1	that asked kind of an interesting and weird question.
0:39.8	Whether or not the American corporations Nestle, USA, and Cargill are responsible for human
0:46.9	rights violations overseas.
0:50.2	The case was brought by six African men who alleged that they were child slaves on farms
0:55.0	that supplied cocoa to these companies.
0:58.7	Should Nestle and Cargill be responsible for that?
1:01.4	So, that was the question.
1:03.1	And a couple of years ago on our spin-off series about the Supreme Court, more perfect,
1:06.9	we actually reported on, well, there's the whole cluster of these cases that all poke
1:11.6	at this question.
1:12.6	Should US companies be responsible for human rights violations that happen in other places
1:19.2	that are not the US?
1:20.2	It's kind of a fascinating question with some fascinating wormholes attached.
1:25.9	So, today we're going to revisit that more perfect episode to shed some light on the
1:30.3	case that Supreme Court is, it could be deciding this term.
1:35.2	The story comes from a more perfect season two.
1:37.9	We're just going to drop right into it.
	...

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